SOY CHOCOLATE

Check the label of most popular commercial chocolate products and you'll see the famous three words. "Pure Milk Chocolate," they brag, knowing that most consumers associate "milk" with creaminess, and satisfaction. What they don't tell you is where, exactly, the milk came from, or its quality, or whether or not it was treated with BGH or other potentially worrisome techniques. Fortunately for those among us who are concerned with the purity of what goes into our food, there is an alternative to traditional chocolate. This alternative, known sometimes as soy chocolate, non-dairy chocolate, vegetarian or vegan chocolate, is fine tuned to be just as satisfying and creamy, without any dairy products whatsoever.

So, how does vegetarian, soy chocolate differ from traditional milk chocolate? It's quite simple, really. Chocolate, as we know it, is the combination of cocoa solids and cocoa fat. To keep these two different forms of cocoa together, chocolate producers use milk as an emulsifying agent. When it comes to producing soy chocolate, a replacement emulsifier is needed. For this, chocolate makers use hexane (a natural solvent) to extract lecithin from a soy bean. With soy lecithin as a stand in for the traditional milk, the result is a dairy free chocolate.

And, while varieties of traditional chocolates still far outnumber soy chocolates, each year brings new additions to the non-dairy side of the chocolate world. Perhaps the most convenient form of soy chocolate is the vegan chocolate chip, whose small size makes it perfect for measuring into recipes and adapting to any purpose. Which explains why more and more bakers are turning to soy chocolate to meet the demands of their more selective clientele!